I remember an old interview with one of the original Mac team members (Andy Hertzfeld or Bill Atkinson, I think) in which the interviewer asked the person whether he was sad that, in the end, the Mac had “lost” and he replied — I can only assume with some indignation — that on the contrary the Macintosh had won. After all, pretty much all computers were now — for all intents and purposes — Macs.
In this — rather important — sense, there are no iPhone-killers, actual or planned, around right now. What we have is a bunch of imitations. Just as Apple redefined what a computer was and could be with the Mac, they’ve redefined what a phone (or phone-sized-device) can and should be with the iPhone, and everyone else is simply copying them. Even RIM — the only iPhone competitor not losing marketshare — is making its phones as iPhone-like as possible within the constraints of not pissing off its existing customer-base. It’s barely possible that in a few years Apple will hold a minuscule share of the cellphone market (or even none at all), but it’s just as improbable that anyone will have changed cellphones the way Apple has, unless it’s Apple.
Apple’s 100,000 apps and 3,000,000,000 app downloads probably mean that Apple’s staying power in the cellphone market will be considerably greater than its staying power in the desktop computer market was.
Back in 1984, Apple shipped a computer with perhaps 20 applications available (most of them rubbish), and pretty much everyone developing apps for the Mac was also shipping apps for rival platforms . This was in an environment where developers expected to have to learn new tools and rewrite apps from scratch for every new platform (and backwards compatibility was almost non-existent). On top of this, Apple didn’t make it easy to become a Mac developer (initially you had to buy a Lisa/Macintosh XL just to run MPW, when an officially sanctioned Mac-hosted SDK finally came out it required you to code in 68k Assembler). Given all this, it’s pretty astonishing Apple managed to cling to around 10% market share until the late 80s.
(Aside: it’s not like Windows was the only Mac-clone that came out. Pretty much everyone who tried to break into the personal computer market in the 80s offered some form of Mac desktop environment clone, usually GEM.)
So, chances are, Apple’s iPhone will be around for quite some time. And, chances are, within a few years pretty much everyone will be using something that is as close an imitation of an iPhone as the vendor can manage. Just as Apple has become better at figuring out how to hang on to customers, the rest of the world has gotten better at imitating Apple.